Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) on Monday posted evidence on X that the Biden White House leaned on Amazon in 2021 to censor books that it considered to be promoting “misinformation” about the COVID-19 vaccines. Andy Slavitt, a senior Biden official, emailed Amazon asking, “Who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon?”
Amazon caved to the pressure and started flagging books that the administration didn’t like with an internal Do Not Promote tag, limiting their reach. Additionally, an Amazon executive reassured the Biden administration that the company had also taken “a number of [other] actions to not show misleading content on vaccinations,” though it’s not yet clear what all of those actions were.
As a private company, Amazon is at perfect liberty to promote, restrict, or depublish any content on its platform. It can also refuse to publish certain material preemptively. There is, after all, no right to publish on any third-party website. With that being said, the fact that Amazon took these actions at the behest of the Biden administration raises very troubling free speech concerns.
One reason is something that Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, calls Mill’s Trident. Named after John Stuart Mill, Mill’s Trident refers to three interlocking arguments that Mill made in his masterpiece On Liberty to oppose censorship.
Mill points out that in any given argument, there are only three options. First, you could be 100% wrong. Second, you could be partially right and partially wrong. And third, you could be 100% correct. In either of the first two cases, free speech is important because it allows you to hear from dissenters and move closer to the truth. Most conservatives and libertarians (along with many moderates) would say that the government’s response to the COVID-19 virus, consisting of forced lockdowns and vaccine mandates, was at least partially incorrect. If this is truly the case, free speech would be imperative because it would allow people to expose the errors being made.
But there’s a third point to Mill’s Trident. What if you are 100% correct? One of the books that the Biden administration flagged was Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines Are Safe and Effective Is Lying by Dr. Vernon Coleman. It may not have added much or any truth to the vaccine discussion (PolitiFact gave some of the doctor’s separate claims a “Pants On Fire” rating.) But even if the book said nothing at all factual or insightful, censoring it was still the wrong move.
Why is censoring an idea wrong, even if your own competing idea is 100% correct? One reason is that true arguments are invigorated by disagreement; that is, they command more attention when there is a public discussion around them. As Mill puts it, “However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.”
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This is an especially important point in a republic. Dictators can get away with ruling through dead dogma backed up by fear, but in a republic, it is we, the people, who are supposed to hold ultimate power. Our leaders are supposed to persuade, not browbeat. If the Biden administration was convinced that its ideas were the best options out there for the country as a whole, then it should have made its case with reason and argument — not by twisting the arms of private companies to censor anyone who disagreed. A dictatorship may not need an informed citizenry, but a republic relies upon one — and a citizenry cannot be said to be informed unless they have access to enough information to make up their own minds.
The Biden administration should never have been in the business of trying to censor ideas with which it didn’t agree. At the very least, it should come clean about its mistakes and beg we the people’s forgiveness.
Julian Adorney is a writer for the Foundation for Economic Education, a member of the Braver Angels media team, and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving and protecting Western civilization.